The present invention relates to displays of time-dependent information. More particularly, the invention relates to automated methods and apparatus for display of information related to the motion of fast-moving markets.
Viewed according to their interest in information regarding fast-moving markets, investors can be classified in three broad categories. First, there are traditional investors. Traditional investors trade approximately once a month. Traditional investors are interested in long term investment. Traditional investors may have very little concern with high-speed information because traditional investors, intending to hold a stock for months or years, may be content to pay any price in a stock's daily trading range. Despite the long-term nature of traditional investing, however, as more information about execution quality and timeliness becomes available to the investing and trading public, even traditional investors become more interested in displays helpful for interpreting A fast-moving markets.
The second category of investors is hyperactive investors. Hyperactive investors are serious hobbyists or enthusiasts rather than professional investors. They do not earn their living exclusively from investing. They have other professions or occupations, but they are focally interested in the process of investing. Hyperactive investors-trade approximately once daily, about twenty times more often than traditional investors. Hyperactive investors are often interested in popular stocks in which they may remain invested for relatively short periods of time, perhaps only a few days or hours. As more information about execution quality and timeliness becomes available to the investing or trading public, hyperactive investors become more interested in displays helpful in interpreting fast-moving markets. Hyperactive investors increasingly demand a high quality of information regarding market motion.
The third category of investors is day traders. Day traders are full-time, individual, professional securities traders. Day traders generally may make thirty to fifty trades a day, perhaps fifty times as many trades as hyperactive investors and a thousand times as many as traditional investors. Day traders probably account for about fifteen percent of the trading volume on Nasdaq. For day traders, quality of execution is a matter of financial survival, crucially important. A delay in execution of even a few seconds can cause a loss for a day trader because markets can change so quickly. Prior art displays of symbols with associated price changes become practically useless to day traders, especially at times of rapid price change. A displayed price can change so quickly that the changes are impossible to follow with the human eye. Moreover, it is the publicized demands of day traders for advanced trading aids, coupled with increased availability over the Internet, that increases the interest of hyperactive investors and traditional investors in availability of such aids.
Systems have begun to appear that give day traders the ability to transmit orders through brokers' systems directly to market makers selected by the day traders themselves. Such systems may provide day traders information, such as latency and transaction costs for each market, that is helpful in deciding how to select markets. Such systems do address the problems of speed of execution. Nevertheless, day traders still often rely on their natural human reaction times to perceive market trends, estimate price trends in fast-moving markets, and chase stocks with orders entered by hand through a keyboard. Markets often move so rapidly that the human eye can not follow price changes displayed on a computer.
Many markets accept limit orders only. As a stock becomes more volatile, it becomes increasingly difficult to purchase for a limit price. By the time the day trader reads the quote on his screen and gets his finger to the keyboard to press the ‘buy’ button, the shares offered at the inside price already have been sold. By the time the trader selects another market and enters another order at a higher limit price, those share can already have been sold, and so on.
Thus there is a need for advanced apparatus and methods for displaying information indicating in more useful ways market motions represented by time-dependent measures. The present invention provides such apparatus and methods. The present invention is described primarily in terms of displays of market information, but persons skilled in the art will recognize that the invention in many embodiments will be used to implement displays for other types of time-dependent information.